Hong Kong’s first locally developed artificial intelligence chatbot, HKChat, has raised expectations that it could compete with more popular and established AI apps, as it racked up around 90,000 users in the city within a week of its low-key release.
HKChat is focused on providing information on local services, including real-time bus arrivals, as well as the city’s weather, laws and regulations. It was the top-ranked free app on Apple’s Hong Kong App Store on Sunday, according to data from app analyst firm Sensor Tower.
Released by the Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Centre (HKGAI) a week ago, HKChat had added more than 8,000 users per day for the past two days, according to the centre’s director, Guo Yike, in an interview on Wednesday.
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“Our goal is to provide Hong Kong residents with a good AI assistant,” said Guo, who serves as provost at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and chair professor at its Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “I think this might be the first such initiative anywhere in the world.”
HKChat supports Cantonese, Mandarin and English. It was developed using HKGAI V1, a large language model (LLM) that the lab built on China’s open-source DeepSeek models, according to the initiative’s announcement in February.
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The initiative reflected the Hong Kong government’s efforts to reinvent the city as a technology hub.